


This is Where I Left You

by mosylu



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - No Powers, F/M, dubious knowledge of medical offices, longtime exes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-08
Updated: 2017-09-08
Packaged: 2018-12-25 06:14:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12029868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mosylu/pseuds/mosylu
Summary: Of all the urgent cares in all the towns in all the world, Caitlin Snow never expected Cisco Ramon to walk into hers on a quiet Saturday morning with a broken finger.But it's been a whole five years since their wrenching breakup. They're both adults. This will be fine. Just fine.





	This is Where I Left You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [swallowthewhale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/swallowthewhale/gifts).



> for a tumblr prompt: "exes meeting again after not speaking for years au"
> 
> Please excuse any medical inaccuracies, I was mostly going on guesswork and Google.

Caitlin was four hours into a ten-hour shift and already dragging, but she forced herself to bite back a yawn and smile at the intake nurse. “Who’s next?”

Eliza rattled off the case number and Caitlin plugged it into the patient program on the Star Health Group-issued laptop. She glanced over the intake notes, ignoring the name at the top. She hardly ever saw people more than once in this job. “Twenty-seven-year-old male with pain in his finger?”

“He applied an ice pack but no splint. He thinks it’s broken.”

“Well, we’ll be the judge of that,” she said, shutting her laptop and tucking it under her arm. “Thanks.”

“He’s pretty cute, too,” Eliza called after her. Like Caitlin, she often picked up weekend shifts at urgent cares all around the Central City metropolitan area, so they knew each other well. She was always nagging about Caitlin’s lack of a love life. “Just saying.”

Caitlin rolled her eyes, waved over her shoulder and turned the corner to room three. She knocked briefly to warn the occupant she was coming in and twisted the knob. “Hi, I’m Dr. Snow, I - ”

“Caitlin?”

Her head jerked up. “Cisco.”

The last time she’d seen Cisco Ramon, he’d been sitting on the couch in their shared apartment, watching her move out with misery in his eyes. She’d been fighting tears, too, but even then, she’d known it was the right choice for both of them. She would be drowning in her studies three states away, and then drowning in the demands of residency. She wouldn’t have the leftover energy to tie her shoes, never mind maintain a long-distance relationship.

It hadn’t made it any easier, especially since Cisco had been convinced they could do it, and their last months together had been an endless cycle of him trying to talk her into staying together. He would move to Coast City, he said. They would Skype every day. What if they got engaged?

But at the time, he was still a year away from finishing his engineering degree, and he couldn’t do it remotely. Her study schedule might permit a five-minute Skype session once a week. And she’d refused to accept the ring he tried to offer her. “An engagement isn’t relationship glue,” she’d told him, trying to ignore the staring eyes of all the people at their favorite restaurant. “Please don’t do this.”

By the time she left with her U-Haul, it was almost a relief to shut the door behind her and know she would never see him again. Almost.

Now, she stood frozen, her laptop clutched to her chest, staring at the one who … was it accurate to say he’d gotten away, when she’d been the one to leave?

He looked as astonished as she felt. “You work here? I thought you had a job at some fancy research hospital in the city.”

His hair was longer, curling past his collar, and he’d lost some of the softness in his face, the way men did in their mid-twenties. His shoulders were broader. His geeky t-shirt wouldn’t have been out of place in college, though, and his eyes were the same, dark brown and broadcasting every emotion he felt. Which at the moment, seemed to be utter consternation.

She bit her lip and then cursed at herself. He knew full well that was one of her nervous tells. “I do. I just pick up shifts at different Star Urgent Cares on my days off.”

“This is your day off? When do you relax?”

He sounded so much like he had in college, trying to make sure she took care of herself, that her eyes stung. She cleared her throat and made her voice brisk. “I’ll relax when I’ve paid off some of my hundreds of thousands of dollars in school loans. I didn’t know you moved back here.” 

The way he’d talked back then, he couldn’t wait to get the hell out of the suburbs and away from his older brother’s magnificent shadow.

He blinked. “I didn’t. My parents needed some help around the house, so I came out here for the weekend.” His eyes met hers. “Hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“It really is,” she mumbled, cursing her choice to sign up for this shift at this location, this weekend. “Cisco, look. You can request to see someone else if this is too awkward. It wouldn’t be at all out of line.” Never mind that she was the only doctor on site all day, and the nurse practitioner who could provide treatment wouldn’t be here for another fifteen minutes. She had to offer him the option.

But he said right away, “No, no, it’s fine. We’re adults, right? It’s been five years since we - And all you have to do is, what? Splint this up?”

“We’ll want to do a little more than that,” she said. “But you should be out of here by noon.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s get to it.”

She nodded firmly, set her computer on the counter, and opened it up. “So, can you tell me what happened?”

He took the ice pack off his left hand and looked at it ruefully. The ring finger was red and swollen. “I was moving some boxes with my pop this morning, and I dropped one and kind of crunched my finger. I thought I could shake it off, but it kept hurting worse, and when I went online, it said it was probably broken.”

She bit back her lecture on diagnosis via Dr. Google. He’d heard it before.

“So, anyway, I thought about taping it up and getting my usual doctor to look at it sometime this week, but it really freaking hurts and you guys accept my health insurance, so I, you know, came over.”

He was chattering at high speed - he was as nervous and off-balance as she was. She took a steadying breath. “That was smart. You really don’t want to let these things go too long.”

“Yeah, no, I like my hands in working condition. Um, so, what are you going to do?”

“Well, first a physical exam,” she said in her calmest, most professional voice, and reached out to take his hand. It was cool and clammy from the ice pack, but it felt so familiar under hers that the last five years might as well not have happened. “Let me know where it hurts.”

She made an effort to turn off her memories and turn on her doctor brain. When she pressed her fingers along the swelling at the base of his ring finger, he hissed, but she didn’t feel any deformities that would mean the bone had snapped clean in two, or that anything had dislocated. “All right, done with that. We’re going to test the range of motion, okay?”

“Yeah, okay.” He winced as she gently moved it back and forth. The range of motion was definitely impacted - he could neither straighten it fully nor curl it into his palm.

“Okay,” she said. “Just from my preliminary examination, I’m thinking hairline fracture in the proximal phalange, right here.” She laid her finger lightly on the first section of his ring finger, closest to the palm. “But we’re going to do an x-ray anyway.”

“Got it.”

She left the room to ask Eliza to get the machine set up, and sat down at the desk in the x-ray room to write her notes. When she was done with that, she rested her head in her palm for a moment.

“Caitlin?” Eliza said. “You okay?”

“Just tired,” she said. “Anybody waiting?”

“Nah. Shawna and Tracy are catching up on filing. I’m hoping it’ll be a quiet day. He is cute, isn’t he? Room three.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’ve always thought so.”

“Huh?”

She looked up with a rueful smile. “He’s my ex. We broke up when I left for med school in Coast City.”

“Oh, no way.” Eliza looked horrified. “What happened? He didn’t want to do long distance?”

“Other way around. It was my choice.” She drummed her fingers briefly on the desk top. “I wanted to focus on my studies, but as usual, I went overboard. I thought I’d just cast off all distractions, cocoon myself in my books for three or four years, and emerge as a beautiful board-certified butterfly.”

Her friend squinted at her. “That doesn’t sound healthy.”

“My therapy bills and my Paxil prescription agree with you.”

“You want to pass him off? Bette should be in soon. Five minutes, maybe. She can take over, right?”

Caitlin shook herself. “No, it’s fine. It was years ago. It was just a shock. Let’s not delay his care because of water under the bridge. All ready?”

Receiving an affirmative, she went and let Cisco know he could come get his x-ray. He hopped down and followed her to the x-ray room. They took the image and then had to wait a few minutes for it to process and get uploaded to the patient file system.

She brought him another ice pack wrapped in gauze to replace the soft, squishy, dripping one that he’d brought from home. He smiled his thanks. She tried to think of small talk to make and remembered something that had required an entire bottle of wine to process about a year ago.

“So, I heard you got married,” she said brightly. He wasn’t wearing a ring, but with the amount of swelling, leaving one on might have cut off his circulation. “Congratulations.”

But instead of smiling and accepting them, he cringed. “Did you also hear I got divorced?”

“Oh,” she said, her stomach trying to jump up in her throat and sink to her knees simultaneously. “No.”

“Yep. But hey, we made it six whole months. Woooo.” He managed a smile.

“I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks,” he said, and for a moment, his smile looked more genuine. “It was rough. I’m doing better now.”

She badly wanted to know what had happened, but bit the question back. If there was one thing worse than having to explain how your marriage had failed, it was having to explain it to your ex-girlfriend. “I’m glad,” she said. “Not about the divorce! About the … better.”

“Me too.”

They made stilted small talk about people they’d both known in college, who had broken up, who was working where, who was having kids. His best friend and her college roommate had gotten married - not a surprise really - and were having twins.

_“Twins,”_ he said again, goggling comically. “My brain shorts out even picturing it.”

“If anyone can handle twin infants, it’s Iris,” Caitlin said, feeling a twinge of sadness. She hadn’t talked to her old friend in years. “I feel like I should get back on Facebook or something. I’ve lost track of so many people.”

“Well, if you do, be really careful about it. After the election, I deleted Facebook off all my devices because I would just sit there and scroll through, feeling shitty. I check in maybe once a week now.”

She cringed. “Probably wise.”

Her computer pinged, and she brought his x-rays up on her screen, turning it so he could see. “Mmmm. Yep. Hairline fracture, no dislocation. You’ll be uncomfortable for a little while, but you should have limited use of your finger in a month, and full use in six weeks.”

“Not bad,” he said. “I can live with that. At least I’m right-handed.”

She added to her notes. “Okay. We’ll splint this, I’ll write you a prescription for some painkillers, and you can be out the door.”

“Great,” he said. “Thanks.”

Splinting and giving him instructions for further care took up another twenty minutes, and then he was shrugging into his jacket - a rather stylish leather number with red and yellow highlights, not one of the disreputable hoodies he’d lived in at school.

“It was good to see you,” he said, his voice all social nicety.

“Yeah,” she said brightly. “You too. Tell your parents hi, and take care of that finger, okay?”

“Will do. Look after yourself, Caitlin.”

She gave him her brightest smile and turned to her laptop. She took another few minutes to finish up her notes and close out his file, until she was sure he’d settled up at the front desk and was gone from the building. Then she went up front. “Anybody else waiting?”

“Nope,” Eliza said. “Bette’s here, she’s with a patient. How are you doing?”

“Well, I survived.”

“God, lady, you’re a trouper. If my ex-girlfriend came in, I’d be in a ball under the desk.”

The thought was tempting. But it would undoubtedly be more productive to text her therapist during her lunch hour. “It’s been a long time, and it helped that I needed to stay professional.”

“Still.”

Caitlin shrugged, glanced out the window at the coffee chain on the corner, and pulled out her phone. “Hey, I’m going to put in a coffee order. You like green tea, right? Do you know what everyone else drinks?” She couldn’t leave the building while she was the attending physician, but as long as it stayed quiet, she could order and pay on the app, and one of the admin staff could run over and pick it up.

“Hey, before you hit send - ” Eliza nudged her, and she looked up see Cisco walking back across the parking lot with a carrying case of coffee drinks in either hand. His splinted finger stuck out awkwardly.

She dashed across the lobby and pulled the door open for him. “Cisco!”

“Caffeine delivery,” he said brightly. “I saw you trying not to yawn, and I’m pretty sure I haven’t gotten that boring in my old age.”

She took the one from his bad hand and took it to the front counter. Eliza made a pleased sound and took the cup marked “Green Tea with Honey,” then disappeared, presumably to tell everyone that caffeine and sugar were in the building.

“You didn’t have to do this,” Caitlin said as he set the other one down.

“It was no big. You guys were great and I was there already.” He took a cold drink drizzled with chocolate syrup and piled high with whipped cream out of its slot. “I literally asked for the Urgent Care weekend crew’s usual order. They were like, ‘yep!’ and started throwing it together before I swiped my card.  And I figured you probably took your coffee the same.” He plucked an insulated cup from the case and handed it to her.

According to the label on the side, it was a latte with a shot of hazelnut and extra whipped cream - exactly right. He always used to ask for extra whip when he got her coffee for her, on the logic that she didn’t treat herself enough. She took it, smiling at the warmth against her hands. She was always a little too cold here. “I do, yeah,” she said. “Really, this was so nice. You could have left a Yelp review.”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t completely generous. It was a good excuse to come back here. Um, can I talk to you a minute?”

“Sure. Yeah. Do you have any further questions about taking care of your finger?”

“No, it’s more of a personal thing. Is that okay? I know you’re on duty.”

She looked around the empty lobby. “I think I can take a few minutes.”

“Ha. Yeah. I guess.”

“Here, let’s - ” She pulled him over to one side of the desk, far enough away that the nurses and admin staff coming by for their coffee couldn’t overhear. “So, what is it you wanted to say?”

“I - ” He rubbed at his brow, the way he always used to when trying to work out something difficult he had to say. “I wanted to apologize for the way I acted, those last couple of months. I really made it a lot harder on both of us.”

She bowed her head over her drink. “You wanted to stay together. Honestly, I did too, but you deserved someone who could be there for you. And for the next few years at least, I just wasn’t going to be that person.”

“I know,” he said. “I know that now. It doesn’t make either of us wrong for the things we wanted or needed, it’s just the way it was. But I thought we could stick it out, because we loved each other. I thought that was all it took. I was wrong.”

The sadness in his voice made her peer at him. This sounded like more than just mulling it over for the last five years. “Cisco? What happened?”

He looked away. “My ex traveled a lot for work. She loved her job," he added quickly, almost defensively. "She was really good at it, it made her happy - but she was gone three weeks out of the month at least. Sometimes more. And like you said, I need somebody who’s going to be there, and I finally stopped pretending I could settle for less just to hold onto someone. We never stopped loving each other, but at the same time, our marriage never really worked.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, for what felt like the fourth or fifth time. What else was there to say to that? She’d been on the other end herself.

“Yeah, so am I. And obviously it gave me a hell of a lot to think about over the past year or so, and I’ve been telling myself I needed to look you up and tell you this for at least that long.” He lifted his head and looked at her head-on. “I’m so, so sorry. You and I, we could have had a great last few months together and stayed friends after. Instead, I just made us miserable. So I wanted to apologize for that.”

“Thank you,” she said, feeling old, scabbed-over wounds start to heal. “And you know, no matter how it ended, I was really happy with you for a long time.” Her throat knotted up. “And I-I hope you were happy being with me.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I was. That’s why I fought the end so hard.”

“It’s understandable. It really is. And you know what, you were right too, when you said I was overfocused on how hard I’d have to work.”

“Oh, come on, you were about to start med school! You totally had to prioritize that.”

“My program was hard, it’s true, but I really didn’t need to draw such a hard line on no-contact, no visits, no nothing. It was tough enough without cutting myself off from everything that makes life worth living.”

He looked up with a little smile. “You seem to be doing okay now.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m - better. I’m really working on that whole work/life balance thing.”

“Says the lady picking up shifts on her day off.”

“Well, I didn’t say I’d mastered it just yet. And you? How are you doing? Really.”

“Like I said, I’m doing better.” He rubbed a hand over his hair. “I’m working for Palmer Technologies, in their Central City R&D department.”

Her mouth popped open in a squeak of delight. “That’s great! Do you like it?”

His face lit. “Yeah! I love it. I get to do the coolest shit. You would not believe.”

“I’m so glad. I always knew you’d be amazing.”

He tilted his head a little. “Yeah. You always said that. Even when I was completely down in the dumps after talking my parents or my brother or whoever. 'You’re going to be an amazing engineer, honey, and don’t listen to anyone telling you different.’”

“Well, I was right.”

He nodded. “And you know what, you’re a great doctor.”

She felt herself flush, and forced out a laugh. “Those are really good painkillers, aren’t they?”

"No, I mean it. You’re calm and reassuring and you told me what was going on and just watching you, I realized this is what you were always meant to do. And even though it meant our relationship had to end, I - I’m glad you took this path. It’s where you’re supposed to be.”

“Thank you,” she said, swallowing. “Cisco. Thank you. That means so much.”

He ducked his head, tucking his hair behind his ear. “Uh, anyway, so. I don’t know which side of town you live on, and I know you’re probably pretty busy what with your regular job and - ” He waved a hand at the lobby. “Your moonlighting gig. But I’m on the west side. If you’d ever like to get drinks or dinner with an old friend and you know, catch up … “

"I’d like that,” she said immediately.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, absolutely.”

“Okay, cool. Can I - ?”

She held out her phone and he programmed his number in. “I’ll text you,” she said. “As soon as I know my next schedule.”

“Sure, we’ll figure it out.” He looked at her, a soft smile spreading over his face. It had been far too long since she’d seen that smile aimed at her. It made her heart thump in her chest, and her stomach go chocolate-melty. “It really was good to see you, Caitlin. Don’t be a stranger.”

“You too,” she said, and watched him go, knowing she’d be seeing him again as soon as she could.

FINIS


End file.
